Actually, Proton + your local key = don’t work very good. Usually you’ll have to use a key pair generated by Proton—sharing your sec with the provider is not good.

Nevertheless, Proton is 100 times better than Google to be sure. Those who are trying to ditch Google, Proton and Tuta are two good options to consider, also recommended by PrivacyGuides. For those who had ditched Big Tech and now starting to wonder if Proton is okay… that’s a bit tricky, still I say Proton is nod bad. I had recommended Proton to my friends until the French activist incident, followed by a few more bad incidents. Yet it’s understandable that Proton must obey it if they get a valid court order… If you’re a normal, daily user, Proton is good enough (if not the best), albeit a bit overpriced.

Let’s say I’m selling you a book B and accepting a crypto payment. What if you sent me your crypto C trusting me, but I exit-scammed, vanishing without sending you B you’re trying to buy? That’d be bad. But what if I sent you B first, trusting you’ll send me C as soon as you receive B? Now you could cheat and vanish without paying. That’d be bad too.

To prevent any of those things from happening, there are a few methods. One is a 2-of-3 escrow service. Another is 2-of-2. Both based on multisig. A simplified example follows.

The book costs you 100€. You’ll send, say, 200€ to address A controlled by both you and me via multi-signature. I too will send 100€ to A. Now Wallet A has 300€. When 2 persons (you and I) sign, there will be a 2-output transaction from A to you (100€) and to me (200€), but any single person can’t move fund from A. That’s multisig.

Now I must send you the book in a good condition, because I don’t want to lose my 100€. So I’ll act carefully and honestly, and sign when I ship the book. You too will be willing to sign when you receive the book, because otherwise you can’t retrieve your 100€ (you deposited 200, when the book only costs 100). Sometimes an unexpected accident may happen, but usually something like this will work pretty well. This is one way how a P2P platform works (not very accurate, but I hope you get the idea).

You’re basically using Kuno to attract potential VPN customers? That could be an interesting, new business model. Some marginalized people can get humanitarian help via Monero, while these supporters (Monero users) are likely to be interested in privacy, so they might buy your VPN service. In theory, this could be win-win-win :) A good potential.

On the other hand, it’s rather obvious that you’re not one of us, not someone privacy-aware. You can read some discussions about Kuno here:

• Kuno XMR Fundraising Platform is Down - We need a fundraiser to get this on a proper hosting provider ASAP https://monero.town/post/921314
• Re: Support Ashley's Laptop/Computer Fundraiser https://monero.town/post/737813

Use Cloudflare (while saying “We protect your privacy”), and you’ll immediately lose 50% of trust. Additionally, the script via CDN in question is for Google Translation… 😓 Like this, perhaps a typical privacy advocate doesn’t even consider your VPN. The worst part is, you’re not even able to see the problem… If you were a privacy advocate, Google wouldn’t be even an option to begin with. (If you’re wondering why, perhaps you shouldn’t do VPN business.) How about LibreTranslate, for example?

Get rid of anything Google, and stop using CF (MitM) so that you might be able to rebuild credibility. Make everything Tor-friendly. That’s a minimum requirement for the “privacy industry”: even something rather iffy like Proton has a token onion. I also suggest you be transparent about Kuno. Make it clear it’s zero-fee because it’s there as a promotion for your VPN business. Such transparency doesn’t make you look bad. On the contrary, people may trust you more, if the reason why it’s zero-fee is not hidden and people behind it are honest.

Kuno could be a great website—it has already helped a few people. Some of us were even saying (thinking) that we were willing to make donation to Kuno itself (not buying your VPN, but we could send you XMR anyway “for free”). Still, I hope Kuno will become somewhat more privacy-aware, so that a typical Monero user feels comfortable with using it. Thank you for reading.

Thunderbird doesn’t passphrase-protect your PGP key. Though you can set a general password… For something less important, its OpenPGP may be convenient, given that if you send/receive email normally, there is metadata problem anyway. But if you need to play it safe, you may want to use gpg offline and paste ascii.

Increasingly more and more “phoning home” is not exactly comfortable, either: thunderbird-settings.thunderbird(.)net location.services.mozilla(.)com addons.thunderbird(.)net versioncheck.addons.thunderbird(.)net services.addons.thunderbird(.)net, etc. Perhaps people today, both users and developers, feel something like this is normal, because things were already more or less like this when they were born.

Re: Micro$oft - It might be that after raped by Google, the society has been desensitized and stopped feeling anything about “minor details.” Why worrying now? You use a Windows 10 passport account (what is it called?) just to log on to “your own” computer and also a Gmail account anyway, right? So bad news is, your privacy is almost zero already.

Thanks for posting the pic! So this is the source of the quotes about the kidnapping incident.

The key point is, you have the choice.

This could mean two different things. 1) You have the choice to use XMR; draw your own conclusions. [positive implications] -OR- 2) Monero is not good; there is no option to freeze it. [negative implications]

PS: Happened to find a still-working privacy instance (Tor-friendly) https://nitter.oksocial.net/cz_binance/status/1723032911278960959#m and I’ll quote:

CZ 🔶 Binance The key point is, you have the choice.

Crypto Eagles I have no choice coz I am afraid of BANKS 😅 so i am all in $BTC

CZ 🔶 Binance It's a good choice. We are lucky to have it.

That might be a good point :)

Never seriously checked these stats. As of writing this, !monero@monero.town = 1.05K subscribers and only 8 users / day, that’s the largest community here if I’m not mistaken; whereas !technology@lemmy.world = 47.1K subscribers, 974 users / day—roughly 100 times bigger, they’re a whale compared with monero.town. It seems our 2nd largest community is !privacy@monero.town: only 260 subscribers, 1 user / day. I (Saki) seem to be one of “privacy” mods, whatever it means. Is this a status automatically given after you created a certain number of new posts?

Anyway, I was assuming that most general people were seeing crypto negatively (because crypto-related posts tend to be automatically downvoted, even if it’s just an innocent joke as in memes, or a normal post like “Use p2pool, it’s zero-fee”), and was surprised to see those positive comments from “outsiders” (?). Apparently there are quite a few people who know Bitcoin was originally not like a “get rich quick” scheme, but it was experimental with some deep philosophy; and that Monero is in a way its spiritual successor.

Then again, many people in !technology@lemmy.world are probably Linux-using geeks. As such they’re tech-savvy, not representing “general people“.

Originally Bitcoin had nothing to do with “get rich quick”. It felt vaguely like Freenet. It was experimental, philosophical, mathematical, cypherpunk… Almost no one had imagined that investors were going to be interested in it and something like that fad would happen.

Unfortunately it’s not easy to get Monero. In several countries, CEXes don’t support it (delisted). Besides, getting Monero from CEX is not ideal privacy-wise. So, a typical Monero user gets it no-KYC, without using CEX. Which is legal, but rather complicated. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend Monero to regular people.

As you said, Monero is such a great way for payment in a practical sense. Very low fees (~1 cent, no matter how much you send), private (only you can authorize transaction, no need to get a permission from someone else). The community is relatively small (monero.town on Lemmy), but generally nice and cozy. We seldom, if ever, talk about investment… It’s so different from what people think when they hear “crypto”. It’s understandable that some people assume it’s just one of those alt sh*tcoins.

That is correct. Tor Browser on Tails comes with uBlock Origin. It might be that DDG (or some other financial supporters) are not happy if the Tor Project ships TB with uBlock. There are many things to be blocked by uB even on DDG, Brave, MetaGer, etc. (although obviously they are much less invasive than you-know-what search engines). Purely privacy-wise they're annoying of course. But understandably they do need to monetize something to provide search engines, and I think some of them are financially supporting the Tor Project too, or they're helping each other, so... I don't know. Just a guess.

Isn't it like Mozilla has to be nice to Google? Ultimately, doesn't this mean that end users are not making enough donations? People say privacy and freedom are important, but normal people really don't like to pay for these important things, like assuming libre is like free beer!

• Monero (XMR) Wallet Hacked: Is Coin No Longer Safe? [u today]

• Monerujo Wallet User Drains Monero’s CCS Wallet: Report [coinedition com]

• Monero (XMR) Crowdfunding Wallet Reportedly Drained by Hackers [en bitcoinsistemi com]

Money is bad—it is used for a lot of bad things like trading drugs or hiring killers…? Money is the root cause of mugging, scams, exploitation, killing, corruption…?

Money is good—it can be used to help people…?

Perhaps money is not good nor bad; a person who uses it may be ethical or unethical. Please do not confuse pure mathematics or technology (such as public key cryptography) with its users/abusers.

Ever heard of Web Environment Integrity (WEI)? Do some research, or perhaps read comments to the actual commit (scroll down). Currently, the general situation seems rather grim.